Hi all, I'd like some advice before I go about trying to set this up.

To clarify, I'm thinking about running Nexenta in a Xen VM, with >5TB of RAIDZ that resides on disks in a separate machine running OpenFiler (iSCSI). The Nexenta VM would act as a NAS. The XenServer would host the Nexenta VM and a few other VMs on it's own storage (Areca 1200 series).

Obviously there is a lot of research I need to do (HCLs, ZFS etc.). The purpose of this post is to find out if you guys think I'm nuts for trying to do this in the first place, considering...:

- Currently I have ESXi as my VM Host and Openfiler as my NAS. I'd like to change things up for a few reasons:

* I have a lot of files to store and would like to take advantage of ZFS checksums/ scrubbing
* ESXi (free) doesn't (easily) support my basic UPS set up

- Why OpenFiler?

* I already have a Si SATA PM that works in OpenFiler and can't afford to buy a new server/ controller to run Nexenta directly
* I'm familiar with OpenFiler enough to set up an iSCSI target

- Planning for the future

* At some point I'd like to take advantage of XenMotion live migration, once I can afford another server and the networking equipment
* I plan to grow my NAS. I'll probably increase it's size 2-3 times by adding multiple large disks at a time.

- Questions

* I haven't had any problems with my PM in OpenFiler. Nor have I had problems with my disks and TLER (WD GP disks). However, would this new set-up increase my risk of loosing data?
* Will it be essential to directly connect (or use a separate GB switch to connect) my OpenFiler and XenServer boxes? Or can I get reasonable performance without a SAN?

- Notes

* I don't need a lot of performance from my NAS -- 30 MBps read/ 15 MBps write would be okay.